It
takes huge faith to let go of the
deep existential yearning for stability

and to let go into the insecurity of life.

-Stanley Phillips

There is a new
emptiness to be filled;

a new journey to be followed.

-Stanley Phillips

The
practice of honest, compassionate confrontation of Ego
is the path to liberating your spiritual center, Essence.
As a result of this courageous practice, youll connect to a higher consciousness
dwelling within. In connecting with your higher consciousness, your inner being will fully
reveal to you the joy and wisdom of the Universe. As the joy and wisdom of the universe
reveals itself to you, youll discover a blueprint for a path of personal liberation
created through the simple act of self-responsibility.

As
you connect to your deep spiritual self, youll experience the grandness of your Being. Youll activate your potential for
joy, love, and prosperity. Loneliness, detachment, and separateness will give way to
inclusion, connection, and interdependence. Your all consuming feelings of despair,
resentment, and fear will transform into faith, compassion, and courage. The chaos of
self-sabotage will change into harmony created by making honoring choices from the core of
Essence.

Your
life will expand as you make choices from a place of self-confidence rather than
self-righteousness. Your enhanced awareness of both yourself and others will create an
infinitely greater power to connect with the people in your life--a connection based on
the expansive energies of love and compassion rather than the constrictive energies of
fear and resentment.

Because
this paths sole purpose is uncovering and freeing your deep, inner spiritual core by
transcending your attachment to Ego, you should
not enter this path without rigorously evaluating the demands that this path will make on
you.

Here
are but a few things for you to consider. Are you ready to give up the illusions you hold
about yourself, your place in this Universe, and the people in your life? Are you willing
to release the people in your life from the expectations you have about who they should be
and what they should do for you--expectations which are the by-product of those
self-delusions you so righteously cling to? Are you willing to shed your beliefs about
your feelings--what you should or should not feel, what you can or can not experience? Can
you commit to fully accepting all of who you are now
as a necessary precondition to accepting all those parts that you do not as yet know
and/or claim.

If I
were you I would be thinking hey, thats a mighty steep price to pay, giving up
my sense of entitlement and security. Whats going to be in it for me? Does the
following appeal to you? Wholeness, created by
integrating the [re]claimed parts of who you are, expanded
consciousness, and connecting most fully
with your inner most spiritual center, Essence.

Why
go through it all--the pain and discomfort? Why get on the roller coaster ride of high
hopes dashed by the deep descent into the darkness of who you are? Why delve deeper and
deeper? Why go beyond the barriers that youve spent a life time

erecting--barriers
intended to separate you from the truth of your existence? Why remove the insulation
between you and the depth of your despair, the magnitude of your pain, the intensity of
your anger, the smallness with which you react to much of what life shoves your way?

Heres
the fundamental problem. So much of who you are has been pushed out of the sight of your
limited awareness, leaving you splintered and fragmented. Yet, all that the human
experience is about is our journey toward wholeness--a wholeness forged from the aspects
of yourself that you are aware of with the aspects of yourself that you have disowned,
existing only within the shadows of your
awareness. Hence, one of the great push and pulls of our existence--remaining wounded,
fragmented, despairing beings or surrendering to one of our most profound existential
urges, to be whole. And to surrender to that urge, means that youll open yourself up
to a journey of joy and sorrow, fear and courage, darkness and discovery, sadness and
spiritual bliss.

The choice of wholeness is made even more difficult because you undoubtedly have good
reasons for being less than whole. Perhaps you were trained to be so based on other
peoples disapproving reactions towards parts of who you were. Or you may have judged
certain parts of yourself to be less than or too
embarrassing to reveal to the world. Perhaps, there are different parts of who you are
that are too painful or otherwise uncomfortable for you to experience and live from.

Whatever
the reason, no matter the mechanism, these disowned parts, like jealousy, lust, greed,
anger, selfishness, neediness, courageousness, assertiveness, and nurturance take on a
life of their own when disowned and hidden in the shadows of your awareness. And they
dont live very quietly on the sidelines. Nope, theyre forever kicking up a
storm, seeking to be expressed, wanting to be seen in the light of day, not caring in the
least how much havoc is created as they seek expression and acknowledgment.

You
see, thats the rub. No matter how much these disowned parts desire to be [re]claimed
and expressed, you expend an enormous amount of energy pushing these parts away from your
awareness. This ongoing battle waged between the disowned parts seeking expression and
your understandable desire to continue to silence these parts contributes to much of the
despair and emotional discomfort you experience. And it is this very drama, the ongoing,
underlying psychological and spiritual conflict between the parts of yourself that you own
and the parts you disown, that leaves you feeling fragmented.

So
wholeness is an important aspect of your emotional and spiritual well-being. In order to
create wholeness, you need to [re]claim all of
your disowned selves as well as divorce yourself from the false selves created by Ego. Think for a moment about all the things that
you deny about yourself. Vulnerability? Emotional expressiveness? How comfortable are you
expressing your softness, compassion, and playfulness? Creativity may live within you but
never be expressed. How safe do you feel expressing your anger, your sexuality, all the
good, the bad and the ugly about who you are? Yet its these very parts of Self--not
given expression, forever pushed further and further away--that take up space in the shadows of your life, oftentimes creating chaos,
and ultimately leaving you disconnected from your lifes journey.

[Re]claiming
those parts of yourself forever unrealized, unacknowledged, and disowned, requires you to
look deeply within. That is why this path requires rigorous
self-examination, so that you can make the unconscious, conscious, the disowned,
owned. By honestly looking inside and discovering these old-new pieces of who you are, you can begin to
view yourself in new ways. In so doing, youll emancipate the rest of your humanity,
wisdom, and compassion. The best part of all is that in becoming whole you will heal the
relationship you have with yourself, enrich the relationships you have with the people in
your life, and create an understanding of the meaning of your life and your connection to
a higher power within your universe.

How do you go about the business of [re]claiming. As I just said it starts with honest self-examination. In its most concrete
terms, you must be in a transformation process
that will enable you to more clearly and honestly see who you are and the underlying
truths about the choices you make.

Secondly,
you need to release yourself from the bondage
created by the judgments you hold about who you are and what you should be. As important
as it is to give yourself permission to be who
you are, do you not recognize how often you stop yourself by censoring what you think,
feel, and do?

This
censorship arises, in part, from many of the judgments you have about those pieces of
yourself you judge to be less than acceptable. Can you see how these judgments inhibit you
from fully [re]claiming all the pieces of who you are. The formula is a simple one--only
when you embrace the good, the bad, and the ugly
of who you are, can you then most fully be present to the here-and-now, available to the
present moment, in mind, body, and soul.

Lets
not kid ourselves here. The act of [re]claiming is easier to write about than to
participate in. The reason is simple. [Re]claiming initially stimulates competing
tensions? On one hand, you have a strong desire for the pain of your existence to be
lifted and exorcised. On the other hand, you have an equally strong desire to not want to go
there. No, its much more tempting to turn back
from rather than delve into the pain of
rigorous self-examination. The idea of embracing those aspects of yourself you like least,
or, out and out despise, is distasteful at best. Yet, in order to heal and obtain release
from the oppression of Ego, you must first
create an integrated wholeness by [re]claiming all that you have disowned.

Dont
let the competing tensions between the desire for healing and the aversion for the cure sabotage your best intentions. The problem
can be easily solved. As you commit to living in Truth by applying the scalpel of rigorous
honesty to the illusions created and fostered by Ego,
the tensions inherent in the process of [re]claiming will subside.

As
you begin to integrate the different pieces of who you are into a greater whole, you will
also necessarily expand your consciousness.
However, no matter how desirable or inevitable it may be to expand your consciousness,
doing so can be as difficult as squeezing an elephant through a keyhole. Why? Two reasons.
First, your mind is terribly limited. Second, you
dont see how terribly limited your mind
truly is.

Therein
lies the problem. Sadly, in spite of how limited your mind is, youve elevated your
mind and all that it perceives and thinks to Godlike status. The irony is that you believe
in the infallibility of what is initially a very
fallible instrument--your mind and its perceptions.

So
how do you get off the merry-go-round that your limited mind creates? In order to expand
your consciousness, in order for your mind to experience its unlimited power and scope,
your mind must continually transcend itself.
That is to say, your mind, itself, must bridge the gap created by its own limitations.
Im sure youre thinking, sounds like a neat trick, but how do I
pull it off?

It
starts with being open to new and expanded
possibilities of who you are, what your life means, and how best to express its meaning.
You bridge the gap by expanding your sense of Self. You expand your sense of Self by
noticing how Ego limits who you are, distorts
the truth about who you are and what is happening in your world, hinders how you can be in
this world, and blocks your connection to Essence.
Theres only one way I know how to open yourself up to seeing beyond the limited ways
you have of thinking about yourself. That way is what is referred to as emptying your cup.

Let
me share with you a story to demonstrate what I mean. A learned professor once went to
visit a Zen master to debate the finer points of Zen. The professor came armed with his
credentials and his many accomplishments in the field of comparative religion. Included in
his introduction to the Zen master was the mentioning of the many awards that had been
bestowed upon him during his long and distinguished career.

While
listening to the professor, the Zen master offered tea to his guest. As the learned
professor continued presenting his credentials of expertise in the field of comparative
religion, the Zen master began to fill the professors tea cup. While the professor
went on and on about the level of expertise he had achieved, the Zen master continued
pouring tea into the learned professors cup until it was overflowing. Even as the
cup overflowed, the Zen master continued pouring and pouring.

The
professor protested, thinking the Zen master a madman. The professor pointed out that the
cup was overflowing and had become too full to hold any more tea.

You are like this
cup, the Zen master told his guest, too full of your own opinions to receive
anything else.

As
you start this path, you, too, will be very much like the professor--too full of
your own opinions to receive anything else. Commit to emptying your cup. Open yourself to the Truths of
the Universe. Dedicate your life to the spirit of Morihei Ueshibas words, You
must have shoshin, a beginners mind, a
mind of pure white paper on which to see the moving images of the [Universes]
secrets. You must try emptiness. A mind that is filled with opinion and prejudice has no
room for the truths of the Universe. If a cup is always full, the water becomes stale and
spoils. To be refreshed, it must first be emptied. If your ears are always filled with the
sound of your own voice, you cannot hear the rich harmonies of God.

Theres
only one purpose for anyone to experience the pain of [re]claiming and go through the
exhaustive efforts entailed with expanding your consciousness--to create a connection with
your spiritual center, Essence. You, like
everybody else, sense an inner longing stirring at the depth of who you are. The source of
this longing is the knowledge that a higher state of consciousness can empower you to
experience life in a fuller way. This longing comes from the sense that there is a grander
form of consciousness from which you can live your life. This grander form of
consciousness, Essence, is what produces a state
of being in which you can live without painful distortions and tortured confusions.
Connecting with this deeper spiritual center, Essence,
is what enables you to function on a level of inner strength, quiet comfort, and security.
Being connected to your spiritual center will allow you to experience your deepest
emotions. You will notice how capable you are of meeting life without fear because you no
longer will fear yourself.

In
order to most fully connect with your spiritual center, you must first remove the self-made obstructions of Ego. Ah,
hah, you might be thinking, one more of his simple statements, pregnant with
complexities, charged with fear and insecurity, a seemingly innocent invitation to merely
abandon what is most familiar to me by wondering off into the darkness of the
unknown.

That
reaction is completely understandable. Ive heard it a thousand times. You see, the
problem is that youre so closely identified with Ego, its overwhelming to even think about how
you could possibly unplug from the identity Ego has
constructed for you. But, whether or not you like the sound or feel of it, thats the
path--cutting your attachment to Ego and
creating an identity that is Essence dominated.

Heres
the single most compelling reason to make such a leap. Living exclusively in Ego has meant youve built a life
thats dependent on emotional and spiritual support from resources exclusively
outside of you. In so doing, youve completely divorced yourself from the reservoir
of divine emotional and spiritual sustenance of Essence.
And as a result of cutting yourself off from your spiritual center, a feeling of
self-alienation has permeated your emotional world. How so? Do any of these sound
familiar?

You
depend solely on winning the admiration and
approval of others rather than self-affirming your own divine grandness. You depend on capturing the love of others rather than attracting
love to you through your own offerings of compassion. You depend on manipulating others to do your bidding for you
rather than relying on faith in your higher power. You depend on placating others rather than honoring the voice of Essence. You abuse
substances to control your mood and environment rather than live in the love and
compassion of your higher consciousness. You lose
yourself in achievement rather than discover yourself through the acts of loving and being
loved. You numb yourself through doing rather than expand yourself through experiencing.

But
when you begin to act from Essence, youll attract an abundance of emotional, spiritual, and
material sustenance from within. This does not mean that youll no longer need the
recognition of others. It does not mean that you wont need the support of people and
things external to you. By living from your spiritual center, you wont be dependent
on external support and recognition to the degree that you currently are.

But
as long as Ego obstructs your connection to Essence, your longings can never be fulfilled.
Theres no getting around this simple fact. Its likely that much of your life
has been spent avoiding it. Panacea after panacea has been tried. All in the hopes of
avoiding the path into and through your own darkness. In order to get beyond your false
hopes, youll have to trust in your own time and in your own way this one simple
truism. Ego is not who you are, Ego is not what is
holding you together. Your spiritual center is who you really are. Essence is the provider
of all you require for living your life.

Wholeness, expanded consciousness, connection to your spiritual center--all worthy, lofty
goals. Indeed, ones that anyone would aspire to. But how do you get there? The answer lies
in the first sentence of this pamphlet--The practice
of honest, compassionate confrontation of Ego, is the path to liberating your spiritual
center, Essence. Just how do you practice honest, compassionate confrontation of Ego? Here are a few tools that youll find
useful--rigorous honesty about yourself and how you
perceive the events in this Universe, experiencing and accepting the totality of your
emotional world, and being present in each moment of your life.

Truthfulness,
created by the clarity from experiencing yourself through the lens of Essence rather than Ego, is the engine that drives personal
transformation. This path demands truthfulness
with yourself about yourself, ownership of what
exists now, elimination of false selves and
pretenses, all amidst the experience of your
naked vulnerability. This is a tall order, and yet its the only authentic path to Essence.

The
point is a simple one. In the first paragraph of this pamphlet I mentioned the word self-responsibility. The key to your
transformation lies squarely with you. The core of self-responsibility is identifying the attitudes in you that prevent you
from experiencing life in a fulfilled and meaningful way.

You
see, this path requires you to face whatever is in you.
Only then can you find your Essence. If you wish
to find your Essence but refuse to face whatever
is in you, this is not the path for you.

So
how does rigorous honesty translate into actions you can take? It starts with constructing
a very specific mindset. YOU MUST BE WILLING TO LOOK
AT YOURSELF AS YOU REALLY ARE INSTEAD OF AS YOU BELIEVE OR DESIRE YOURSELF TO BE. YOU MUST
RECOGNIZE AND ACCEPT WHO YOU ARE IN THIS VERY MOMENT. These two statements are the
most elemental aspect of the work that lies before you. All of your difficulties stem from
your desire to cling to illusions about who you are, how you are what you are, and how you
should be. Until you give up these illusions and rigorously examine the truth about who
you are, those illusions will leave you alienated from your own spiritual Essence.

So
rigorous self-examination requires, first and foremost, that you surrender the self-righteousness with which you
imbue your reactionsto your life experiences.
Until you recognize your daily dishonesties, self-deceptions, and erroneous assumptions
embedded in your reactions, you cant possibly make room for a new, expanded, Essence dominated reality.

Once
youve developed a mindset for honest self-examination, heres a simple,
specific way for you to examine your reactions
to the events and circumstances of your life. You can examine your reactions by exploring their authenticity. For purposes of this
discussion, I refer to reactions as the
collective whole of your perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. I refer to authenticity as whether your reactions are authored by Essence.

Quite
simply, as you attend to your reaction to any
event or circumstance, you only need ask yourself , who is the author of this reaction--Ego
or Essence? If you identify the reaction, as being authored by Essence, then you merely need listen to it, honor it, and follow it.

If
you identify the reaction as being authored by Ego, then you only need explore it. Here are some questions you might use
to help explore the authenticity of your reaction to an event or person. What part of Ego is the author of this reaction? Why is it so important for you to hold
onto that part of Ego? What wound is this reaction oozing from? How can you heal the wound within that part of Ego? Finally, and most important of all, what would
this specific reaction look and sound like, if it came from Essence rather than Ego?

There
are some important implications about what I have just suggested. These implications are
about what rigorous honesty is not. Rigorous
honesty is not the byproduct of accumulated knowledge, theoretical understanding,
disciplined study, or achievement of goals. Rigorous honesty is not a derivative of your
desire to be different in your life, or by striving to attain a state that does not
already exist within. It can come only by being in the moment, by discovering that
everything already exists within, behind the levels of confusion and pain.

Rigorous
honesty is the process that will free yourself from the illusions created by Ego. However, you cannot fully free yourself from
Ego until you fully unearth and experience all
of your feelings. Implied in this statement is the idea that you cant merely think
your way through this process. The reason for that is simple. Theres nothing
whatsoever for you to learn on this path,
there are only experiences for you to be
present to. And if you only attend to your life experiences with your mind, then you will
manage to merely sanitize your life experiences, but in no way be present to the joy,
sorrow, and/or wisdom that they can convey to you.

Experiencing
the totality of your feelings is an absolute must. Theres no getting around it. You
may wonder how that can be so. Afterall, so much of what you do feel is so uncomfortable.
Often times you may believe that your feelings are nothing more than a keg of dynamite
just waiting to explode. And thats just the beginning of the catastrophe. For once
the fuse is lit, the potential for your world to be irrevocably thrown into a swirl of
chaos and loss of control looms larger than any possible advantage you can think of to
work through whatever it is that youre feeling.

Perhaps
you have come to fear what it is that your feelings reveal about you. But no matter how
negative, mean, vain, or egotistical a feeling that youre experiencing is, its
important that you recognize that theyre merely part of who you are.

The
rule of thumb is a simple one to understand, a tough one to follow. No matter how destructive, cruel, or bad a feeling
might be, your feelings, in their original form, are nothing more nor less than beautiful
and positive energies of your consciousness. By taking ownership of your feelings, you can
work through the distortions embedded in your feelings and convert them to their original
form.

No
matter how negative or explosive, how complimentary or not, no matter how frightening or
liberating, your feelings are, its essential that every aspect of your emotional
world be accepted and dealt with. No part of your emotional world should be avoided or
glossed over in the hope that it matters not whether or not you acknowledge your feelings.

Rigorous
honesty is the scissors youll use to sever the ties that Ego holds on you. Experiencing and accepting the
totality of your emotional world is the scalpel youll use to cut through layer after
layer the scar tissue youve accumulated over the years. There is one more device at
your disposal, a device that will be the most important teacher youll ever come
upon--the present moment.

The
present moment is a grand teacher. Through your connection
to the present moment, youll acquire a very personalized look at your reactions to the events and circumstances of your
life. For even in the most insignificant moments of your life, your Ego dominated conditioned
reactions will be activated. In this regard, the present moment serves as a mirror,
reflecting back to you your allegiance to inflexible conditioned responses,
self-sabotaging choices, and oppositional behavior born out of fear and ignorance. It is
this intimate connection to the present moment that facilitates your moments of
transcendence--not by paying lip service to personal transformation, not by an act of
sheer willpower, nor through information collected by a superior intelect.

Not
only a sacred teacher, beyond a hallowed mirror, being connected to the present moment
also awakens you to the fact that your life
unfolds only in moments. In order to most fully
appreciate the preciousness of your life, in order to make choices that honor your life,
attending to each unfolding moment is of primary importance.

Its
easy enough to see why that would be so. Your life is made up of a never-ending parade of
choices. But for many of us, the life choices we make do not honor the Essence. Why? Think about it for a moment. What
most influences the choices that you make about your life--fear and self-doubt or courage
and faith? What best characterizes the foundation on which you build your
relationships--acceptance, trust, and love, or judgment, suspicion, and possessiveness? Do
you approach each new moment of your life as a victim or a warrior? How does your
egocentric, self-will warp what often starts out as your best intentions? You know the old
saying about talking the talk? Which will it
be for you--will you talk the talk or walk the walk?

Theres
much that will enrich your life as you progress beyond the initial stages of [re]claiming
the disowned parts of yourself, taking ownership of all that you experience and feel, and
shedding the influence that Ego exerts on your
life. As your vision becomes grander, as your perceptions become clearer, as your life
becomes more majestic, youll discover the potential within you, youll
experience your own divinity. Just as Dorothy found out in the Wizard of Oz, theres no place like home,
theres no place like home, I hope for you a life time of discovery that theres
no place like your spiritual center--home to all that is grand, loving, and wise about who
you are. I wish you peace and good fortune as you set out on the path to your own
spiritual home.